{"id":60207,"date":"2020-09-21T17:50:29","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T15:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/victor-deme-sans-la-musique-le-monde-va-devenir-fou-2\/"},"modified":"2020-09-21T18:09:56","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T16:09:56","slug":"victor-deme-without-music-the-world-would-go-mad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/victor-deme-without-music-the-world-would-go-mad\/","title":{"rendered":"Victor D\u00e9m\u00e9: “Without music, the world would go mad”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ten years on from the album’s initial release, Heavenly Sweetness<\/a> have reissued a vinyl release of the record that turned the late Burkinab\u00e9 singer famous, who passed away five years ago.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

2008. The year the Burkinab\u00e9 singer Victor D\u00e9m\u00e9 released his debut solo album and was placed on all the international stages. It is as if the musician finally got revenge on the years of hassle he had to go through and the battles he had to fight \u2013 even against his own family \u2013 to eventually dedicate himself entirely to music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That same year, we met in Ouagadougou, inside the Ouagajungle studio where the infamous album, Victor D\u00e9m\u00e9<\/em>, was recorded. At the time he was about to fly out to perform his first concert in France, a country where the radio played his track “Djon Maya” on heavy rotation. He couldn’t believe it. Especially when looking back on his past, and remembering the twisted paths that his journey through life had paved for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D\u00e9m\u00e9, as he was known, was born in 1962 in Bobo-Dioulasso, two years after the independence of Upper-Volta, now Burkina Faso. At a very young age, he followed his parents to Abidjan where his father settled down as a tailor-embroiderer and expected to see his son take the business over from him. Which is why he chose to keep his son next to him in the workshop, sitting at the sewing machine, rather than sending him to school. However, each summer he would spend holidays at his grandparents’ in Upper-Volta, and very much enjoyed spending time with his griot-grandmother who would always sing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy grandmother would dress brides, do their make up and braid their hair. And the whole time doing this she would sing songs to the bride. Something like: <\/em>‘You are going to enter another family, and walk with the cadence of this family. You are not a free woman anymore.’ She was always singing, even while doing the laundry, and I would hear sounds that made me travel\u2026 That’s why I always wanted to be next to her.”  <\/em>Back in Abidjan, D\u00e9m\u00e9 would slip out of the workshop more and more often to follow musicians, and in particular Abdoulaye Diabat\u00e9, who hired him as a backing vocalist in his band Super Mand\u00e9. They participated in the famous TV show Podium<\/em> hosted by Fulgence Kassy. Against his father\u2019s advice, he had just started a career in music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI chose music, and it got me in so much trouble. According to Muslim religion, they say that God does not like chants, and some griots gave up singing just because of this. I spent five years without playing music. Then I came to understand that God did actually love music, so I said to myself, <\/em>‘don’t wait any longer!’“<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s one thing D\u00e9m\u00e9 is convinced of: music helps people to live better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If a kid is a delinquent, just send them to music school, as it will change their ways of thinking and calm them down. Music takes you to another planet where there is no wickedness, where you don’t think about death, where you forget all that is bad. And even my own family, who told me ‘don’t ever sing’, they themselves sing to worship God. In the mosque you have to sing, in the church you have to sing, so that you can worship God. But that’s what God asks from us… without music, the world would go mad.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years later, having played in orchestras in Bouak\u00e9 (Ivory Coast) and Bobo-Dioulasso (in Upper-Volta, now Burkina), he returned indefinitely and settled in the capital, where he joined the Supremes Kombemba, a band regularly awarded \u2013 notably, twice, for the National Cultural Week prize. Solo, he even went on to win a contest organized by a cigarette brand. This is the moment when he thought his time had finally come!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prize consisted of a plane ticket to France, or a moped. D\u00e9m\u00e9, well-grounded, chose the moped. But the cigarette company that had promised to develop the career of the awarded candidate eventually let him down. Now alone with just his bike, it was like starting from scratch. He would go through the \u201990s and mid-2000s performing solo in cabarets, with a guitar that he often had to borrow, to earn peanuts: they would often pay his performances in alcohol \u2013 two “balls” of Pastis (anise-flavored spirit), a calabash of tchapalo<\/em> (millet beer), and more rarely, two or three hundred CFA Francs [approximately only 38 \u20ac cents, 35 \u00a3 pence, 45 $ cents].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I was about to become an alcoholic tramp. I would drink a lot in the cabarets, but I always came home with 1.000 or 1.500 CFA Francs [approximately 1.90 \u20ac, \u00a3 1.75, $ 2.26].”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore, people saw him as a good-for-nothing musician unable to earn enough to survive. Incidentally, as a nod to these troublesome times, the Victor D\u00e9m\u00e9<\/em> album recently reissued on vinyl by Heavenly Sweetness, begins with an introductory track in which you can hear the women who live next to the singer tell him: “You are annoying us with your guitar!”<\/em>Actually, let’s talk about the album a bit now, which was recorded thanks to D\u00e9m\u00e9’s meeting with Paris-based Radio Nova journalist David Comeillas and the young French sound engineer Camille Louvel, then living in Ouagadougou. In the Ouagajungle collective’s studio, the recording booth is isolated by thick glass taken from disused truck windshields. It’s hot in there, but the place quickly became the den for dozens of musicians from the Burkinabe capital. Camille Louvel and David Comeillas broke their piggy banks to produce the record, but were still struggling to find any labels interested. Helped by their friends from the Makasound label, they decided to set up their own label, Chapa Blues \u2013 “Chapa” as a reference to the tchapalo<\/em> beverage, and “blues” certainly as homage to the voice of Victor D\u00e9m\u00e9 when he sings “Djon Maya\u201d. A song that resembles his destiny, that of a modest man looked down upon by everyone, and who, without anyone seeing it coming, suddenly arrived at the top.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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